Preventing National Suicide

Tips on conserving and protecting from across the pond.

By Melanie Phillips
Thursday, November 6, 2008

In Britain, there is a collective swoon over the election of Barack Obama. Media superlatives have exhausted the lexicon of cliches. Journalists wept with joy over his acceptance speech. Even members of the Conservative shadow cabinet are firmly in the fan club. There’s been nothing like it since... well, I was going to say Dianamania, but actually the person who most comes to mind at this moment is Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair.

Like Obama, Blair took the country by storm when he won the first of his three general elections in 1997and threw the Conservative party completely off balance (indeed, it still hasn’t recovered). Like Obama, Blair was charismatic, eloquent, hip, and relaxed, in cruel contrast to the bunch of sleazy, incompetent throwbacks to the paleolithic era in the departing Conservative administration. Like Obama, Blair was seen as a messiah figure, who would lay his hands upon a broken nation and bring healing where there was discord. And like Obama, Blair had an agenda of change.

Blair was widely considered to be a conservative cuckoo in the Labour nest. Indeed, he came to power because he symbolically trashed the party’s commitment to state-control socialism, thus establishing his credentials as a centrist. What few realized at the time was that in fact he was a radical of a different stripe. He wanted to remake Britain and even change human nature itself, wiping out prejudice and ushering in a new world order of progressivism.

Accordingly, his government either directly promoted or did nothing to stop the long march through Britain’s institutions — the systematic undermining of the country’s fundamental values and traditions, in line with the cultural Marxism strategy of the philosopher Antonin Gramsci. It tore up Britain’s (unwritten) constitution, devolving power to Scotland and changing the composition of the upper parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, destroying the delicate equilibrium of the balance of power.

It also set about changing the identity of the country. Promoting the doctrine of multiculturalism, it opened Britain’s doors to mass immigration. In the state-controlled schools, teachers no longer saw their role as the transmission of Britain’s historic culture, which was “racist”; accordingly, children were not taught the history of their country, but instead a concept of ‘citizenship’ which was all about changing the values of the country. It undermined marriage, promoting instead “lifestyle choice” by incentivising lone parenthood (official forms no longer refer to husband and wives, merely “partners”). It discouraged prison sentences because criminals were said to be victims of life and jail would make them worse.

Obama has talked about remedying what he sees as the flaws in the U.S. Constitution which promotes only “negative liberties,” or freedom from something rather than positive rights to something. Well, through human-rights legislation Britain has exchanged its historic concept of “negative” liberty — everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited — for the ‘positive’ European idea that only what is codified is to be permitted.

As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits. Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.

All this constitutes a profoundly illiberal culture in which no dissent is permitted, group is set against group and intimidation is the order of the day. And this also happens to be the culture of ACORN, of the radical groups funded by the Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund, and the ‘educational’ or criminal justice ideas of William Ayers, endorsed by Barack Obama.

Just as Britain thinks the “powerless” can do no wrong at home, so it thinks the third world can do no wrong abroad — and even when they fly planes into American buildings, the blame therefore lies with America for behaving badly in the first place. It is hard to exaggerate the virulent hatred of America that has been coursing through Britain these past eight years. The reason was that America had dared to defend itself by use of force, riding roughshod over the U.N., and thus, it was said, putting the rest of the world at risk; and that it wanted to export its values to countries which did not live under democracy and the rule of law because it thought that these values were superior to their own. Britain thought this was an imperialism which had cost thousands of lives — and that America was to blame for Islamic violence in the first place because it supported Israel.

Now, however, the refrain in Britain is that “now we can all love America again.” Britain is ecstatic that America has elected an apparently antiwar president in a time of war. Some might think this is a form of national suicide. But Britain recognizes Obama as one of its own. That is because Britain’s intelligentsia and political class is signed up to “transnational progressivism” which holds that the nation is the source of all the ills in the world because it is inherently racist.

Obama believes America has to expiate its sins: both its original, Founding sins of slavery and racism, and its latter-day sins against the world of Islam. Britain likes the sound of that. It wants America to be humbled. Nations, it thinks, cause wars. Arrogant, hubristic, imperial nations like Bush’s America cause big and horrible wars. By contrast transnational institutions — such as the sacred UN or EU — promote civilised “engagement” with the enemy to discuss grievances and reach compromises. So it is thrilled that Obama will get out of Iraq and talk to Iran and may even force wretched Israel (which Britain blames for Everything Bad in the World) to give away the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem to the Arabs.

The fact that such actions would leave Iraq in chaos, empower Iran still further, destroy Israel’s security and imperil the free world doesn’t trouble it at all. And if Obama, under the responsibility of office, should change from an appeaser to a war leader in America’s national interest, then Britain’s new found love for America would revert once again into rage and disdain.

Of course, transnational progressivism, multiculturalism, victim culture, pacifism. and all the rest of it do amount to a national suicide note. The reason Britain has embraced them is because, for the past several decades, it has lost belief in itself as a nation and so has been systematically hollowing out its values and its defences.

The result is a cultural vacuum which is steadily being filled by radical Islamism. Paralyzed by its “universal” value system of multiculturalism and minority rights, Britain is failing to assert its own civilisational principles against the cultural onslaught being mounted by Islamists. Accordingly, it is permitting the spread of Muslim enclaves governed by a parallel jurisdiction of sharia law — the steady creation of a “state within a state” — encouraging the development of sharia finance, and permitting Saudi money to fund British universities and other institutions.

Millions of Britons are appalled by the implosion of British culture, identity, and values. But they find themselves politically disenfranchized, because the Conservative party does not understand that British values are under attack. And Republicans should take careful note of this in order to recognize a similar danger and dilemma facing them following their defeat.

The British Conservatives think that, to regain power, they have to show they have broken with cultural conservatism and go instead with the way society has changed — gay rights, green politics, anti-racism. What they have failed to grasp is that such change has turned values such as right and wrong, good and bad on their heads and has produced a sentimentalised, cruel, oppressive and perverse society — one where burglars go scot-free but householders are prosecuted for putting the wrong kind of garbage in the trash can, and where people are too frightened to protest at the erosion of British, Christian, or Western values because of the opprobrium that will follow.

The Conservatives don’t realize that by embracing such “change” they are endorsing a kind of enslavement. They don’t realize that the first duty of a conservative is to conserve that which is precious and protect it against attack. The result is that millions feel betrayed and abandoned by the absence of conservatism, and yet more still think the Conservative party is just a bunch of opportunists who don’t have any principles. Why vote for the progressive wannabes, after all, when you can have the real thing?

The challenge for conservatives on both sides of the pond is to find a way of conserving the essential values of Western Civilization and defend them against the onslaught being mounted against them both from within and from without — but to do so in a way that is generous and big-hearted rather than narrow and sectarian, and embraces rather than repels.